WASHINGTON: A group of 17 US Senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday calling for the United States to press Israel to grant access and protection to journalists in Gaza.
The letter comes one week after an Israeli strike killed a group of Palestinian journalists in the besieged territory.
“The United States must make it clear to Israel that banning and censoring media organizations and targeting or threatening members of the press is unacceptable and must stop,” the Democratic senators said in a statement.
The letter to Rubio, a staunch supporter of Israel, said: “We urge you to press the Israeli government to protect journalists in Gaza and allow international media to access the territory.”
Last week, an Israeli strike killed four journalists for Al Jazeera, including Qatari television correspondent Anas Al-Sharif, as well as two freelance journalists.
The attack spurred an international outcry.
The letter condemned the attack, writing: “Absent a compelling explanation of the military objective for this attack, it appears Israel is publicly admitting to targeting and killing journalists who have shown the world the scale of suffering in Gaza, which would be a violation of international law.”
Among the signatories were Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine and 13 other Democratic senators, as well as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a registered independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
The Washington Post on Wednesday night also reported that a member of the press office for the US State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs, Shahed Ghoreishi, was fired after suggesting Washington offer condolences for the journalists killed in Gaza.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in early July that more than 200 journalists had been killed in Gaza since the war began, including numerous Al Jazeera journalists.
With Gaza sealed off, many media groups around the world, including AFP, depend on photo, video and text coverage of the conflict provided by local Palestinian reporters.
US senators push for improved press access in Gaza
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US senators push for improved press access in Gaza
- A group of 17 US Senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday calling for the United States to press Israel to grant access and protection to journalists in Gaza
Amazon’s AWS reports outage after UAE datacenter struck by ‘objects’
- AWS confirmed sparks and fire after objects hit UAE data center causing disruptions to Emirate and Bahrain regions
- Full recovery expected to “be many hours away”
LONDON: Amazon’s cloud-computing facilities in the Middle East faced power and connectivity issues on Monday after unidentified “objects” struck its data center in the United Arab Emirates.
The objects had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to eventually cut power to two clusters of Amazon data centers in the UAE, with restoration expected to take several more hours, according to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) status page.
Localized power issues impacted AWS services in both the UAE and neighboring Bahrain, according to the page. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.
While Amazon did not identify the objects, the incident happened on the same day Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf States in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A strike, if confirmed, on the AWS facility in the UAE will mark the first time a major US tech company’s data center has been knocked offline by military action. It could also raise questions around Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the region.
US tech giants have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November it plans to bring its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips for its data centers there.
“In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,” Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Microsoft as well as Google and Oracle — both of which also operate facilities in the UAE — did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
AWS said a full recovery from the issues was expected to “be many hours away” for both UAE and Bahrain.
The outage had disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
